Housing as a Tool for Freedom: A Future Away from Incarceration

Today, the world’s prisons are home to circa 11.5 million people globally, an increase of more than 27% from 2000. Post-incarceration is a major challenge that reflects and contributes to the broader systemic issues within the criminal justice system, expressed by high recidivism rates. This interdisciplinary project proposes to reframe what spatial assemblies, edifices and policies are necessary on the path from prison, addressing the reentry process using housing as an infrastructure of care, incorporating an abolitionist epistemology. HOUSINGFREEDOM aims to:— Develop an innovative conceptualisation for studying housing in the context of post-incarceration, by conducting a far-reaching study of reentry processes. This approach is designed to overcome limitations in global scholarship on the nexus between post-incarceration life and housing insecurity. — Map and study how can the narratives of the formerly incarcerated people and their housing struggle facing reentry inform practical interventions, shaping more just urban landscapes, under a ‘abolition by design’ approach, also offering incisive policy analysis to informs policy reform.— Provide a solid conceptual, methodological, and empirical foundation for carcerality studies across a vast range of disciplines, through a participatory approach.Methodologically, HOUSINGFREEDOM offers innovative design-based spatial and visual analysis strategies to reimagine spatial justice and decent housing for those who leave incarceration, along mapping and multimodal ethnography. A research-by-design approach to humanize (not criminalize) by design will engage a Community of Practice with those affected by carcerality, centred in Portugal, Belgium and Norway. Radical and ambitious, HOUSINGFREEDOM bridges the gap between these seemingly distinct fields, carcerality and housing instability, by shedding light on the cyclical nature of poverty, crime, and social exclusion.